


Monster

by ElsieMcClay



Series: Voltron Fics [8]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Langst, Panic Attacks, lance is captured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 16:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/ElsieMcClay
Summary: Lance is captured, but he's not himself





	Monster

**Author's Note:**

> Originally for Kymy on Tumblr :)

Lance can’t move. He’s awake, and he can see the glowing yellow eyes of some Galra soldier watching over him, but he can’t move. There’s not even anything binding him in this position, he just can’t move. He thinks it’s some sort of magic, but he can’t really be sure because he barely remembers getting captured. There are just fuzzy memories like someone went through his mind with the blur tool in Photoshop. 

His chest is heavy, and his lungs feel like they’re lead being melted, and he doesn’t have to feel his face to know it’s probably a few inches lower down his skull than it normally is. His breaths come out in short, ragged and frozen pants. It’s so cold in the cell, but Lance’s skin is on fire. 

Lance might be dumb, but he’s smart enough to know that something is wrong—very wrong. The distorted faces of the people he knows but can’t quite place names to dance in his mind, teasing him. Fragments of someone talking to him scream at him, but they’re almost…voiceless. Just words, cut in half by Lance’s mind, like the knife of a surgeon slicing through the skin of someone on the table. The cuts are precise in a twisted way. The words make whoever they’re said by seem like they’re insults aimed at Lance’s chest. Lance doesn’t have the energy to even try to move his arms to protect himself.

The next thing Lance knows, he’s awake, and he’s moving through the halls. H’s legs feel like they’re jerky and robotic, but Lance is too stiff to look around. He barely feels like it’s him moving, and he briefly thinks he’s having one of those out of body experiences, but he can’t dwell on it because there’s an explosion, followed by yelling and fighting. The clang of metal on metal echoes down the hall and Lance is dragged there by the guard next to him. The guard disappears in the fighting, and Lance is left to fend for himself against the attackers. 

He feels taller now that he thinks about it. Taller and stronger, and his limbs are harder to control. He must be growing or the magic from Haggar is messing with his body or something. 

Lance doesn’t know what to do. He wants to get out of prison on this ship, definitely, but where will he go? He has nowhere else to go, but this seems like the perfect time to escape. But what if this is all a trap, and Lotor and Haggar are outside waiting to take him back to his cell (which keeps shrinking for some reason). 

“When in doubt, go with your instincts,” he hears. Lance thinks of who that could possibly be. The voice is choppy, and the backgrounds in the fragments are different like someone took what they wanted out of his memories and just smashes them together. But instincts? What are his instincts telling him to do?

Fight. They say, but they also say run, get out. Even his instincts don’t know what to do. Lance sees a flash of one of the distorted faces from earlier, but he’s here. In person. Maybe he can help! 

The man with the white tuft of hair is surrounded by Galra, though. Protect him. Finally, his instincts can decide on something. Lance storms in, and he throws the Galra away from the man.

“RoBeast!” A few people scream. Lance whips around and scans the room. Where? He holds up his hands. Those aren’t—those aren’t supposed to be metal and green.

He’s glowing. He’s not supposed to glow. People don’t glow, right? Lance feels like the breath is knocked out of him. Lance stumbles forward as a tail of a…giant lion? He doesn’t know. Anyway, a Red Lion is snapping at him. There’s a rumble in the back of Lance’s mind, but he’s being attacked. They’re so much bigger than him, like the bullies at his school back on Earth.

He was just protecting a little girl. His Mama taught him right like that, but it ended up with him getting bullied for three years. These Lions are like the bullies, so Lance does what he always did, and he drops to the ground and covers his head. He can hear people talking like they’re inside his head.

“It’s not doing anything.”

“Oh my God,” Someone mutters. “It’s not doing anything because it’s Lance.” 

“How? And how can you tell, not that I’m saying it’s Lance because it looks like some sort of melted robot, but—“

“He was bullied, okay? Doing this was, like, his coping mechanism. He got the idea from one of those dumb tornado drills, and we were learning about how tornadoes tear up everything. He told me his bullies were a lot like tornadoes, so he did this.” The Yellow Lion lands next to Lance. His chest is tight as someone steps out. It’s another one of the distorted faces without a name. 

“Hunk! Be careful,” someone screams. “He can throw you—he already threw all of us to save a Galra Druid.” He did? When? He doesn’t want to hurt these people; he wants to protect them. Lance wants to cry, but he can’t. He’s fading, fading fast at that. He’s aware of every breath, every movement, everything. There’s a split second where everything is suddenly serene and comfortable, but a moment later, Lance is screaming, and his skin is crawling, and he hurts in places he never knew could hurt. He can barely hear the “Lance!” over the pain. He’s falling, falling, and he’s gone, lost to the dark oblivion. 

Lance wakes up cold. He’s cold, but he feels better. A little sore, a little stiff, but way better than before. He doesn’t remember what happened, but he’s sure the team will. The team. Mm, their arms are so warm and welcoming. 

“What happened?” Lance asks as Shiro sets him on a bed. 

“Nothing. You were captured, tortured, and we got you out.” Lance can tell there’s something more. Shiro’s stance is uncomfortable, and Lance knows the Galra wouldn’t have made it that easy. 

“What else?”

“You, uh, you turned into a RoBeast,” Pidge mutters. “We all had to spend time in the pods because you threw us away from some Galra Druid.” Lance’s blood runs cold, colder than the rest of him. He can’t breathe.

“I-I-I hurt y-you?” he stutters. He holds himself and blinks away the tears gathering in his eyes. 

“Pidge,” Keith hisses. Hunk goes to hug Lance, but Lance scoots away from the touch. Hunk drops his hand. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t mean to tell him,” Pidge tells the team. Lance is curled up impossibly small for someone as tall and broad as him. He’s trembling and staring off into space and gulping down air like he can’t get any into his lungs. 

“He’s having a panic attack,” Hunk mutters. “We can’t do anything to help him down.” Hunk and the team watch as the Blue Paladin works himself through a panic attack. When he’s done, he takes one look at the team and tries to run out the door. If it weren’t for Keith’s reflexes and strength, they would’ve had to search the entire castle for the next day to find Lance.

“I don’t—I can’t,” Lance stutters. He takes one look at Keith, and he breaks down. His legs buckle, and Keith lowers them both onto the ground. Keith holds Lance as he sobs into his shoulder.

“Sh-sh-sh,” Hunk mutters in his ear as he takes Lance into his arms. “It wasn’t you, okay?” Lance nods, and his eyes fall shut. He’s out, but no one knows for how long. No one would be able to sleep after that, even if they don’t remember it. 

For a while, Lance is okay. Then, snippets of his time with the Galra come back to slap him in the face to remind him that he’s not okay. First, it’s the torture sessions. Then, it’s the feeling of his skin melting off. The yellow eyes. The distorted voice of his mother telling him to follow his instincts. He wakes up screaming and sweating and shaking. All of his team will stumble into his room and gather him up in their arms. 

There’s a mission they all go on to the Galra ship. Lance is fighting when he sees a druid he remembers. He’s merciless. His team doesn’t stop him, and they don’t stop Shiro when he does the same to a guard near the prison cells. The Galra have messed up two-fifths of the team plus some of their families. They deserve no mercy.

Lance thinks about the saying “he who fights monsters must be sure he does not become the monster” a lot. He was forced to become the monster he hunts. He feels like he’s less Lance than he is the monsters he fights.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow my tumblr--elsiemcclay!!!


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